Jack (The House That Jack Built)
Jack is the titular antagonist of the 2018 psychological horror art film The House That Jack Built. He was portrayed by , who also played Jonathan Corliss in A Kiss Before Dying, Patrick Healy in There's Something About Mary, Sam Lombardo in Wild Things, and Trip Murphy in Herbie: Fully Loaded. Biography The film follows the twelve years that Jack was active as a serial killer through 5 "incidents." In the first incident, Jack meets a woman who needed to fix her broken jack for her car. After commenting that she initially thought that Jack was a serial killer, Jack ponders over her words. When she takes her to the car repairman and gets her tire jack fixed, it gets broken once again, but this time, Jack murders her. From there, Jack began to refer to himself as Mr. Sophistication. His next target is a widow. He convinces her that he represented her deceased husband and could help her with his pension. The widow takes her offer and lets him in. He then tries to strangle her to death in a sloppy manner, but when that failed, he gives her a stale doughnut and water as a means of making her asphyxiate. When that doesn't work, he then stabs her in the heart. Cleaning up the room, Jack is nearly caught by a police officer alerted to the disturbance, but manages to escape. He then places her body in the industrial freezer. Sometime later, Jack met a single mother and started to date her. One day, he suggests that they go hunting. Jack's true intentions become apparent when he executes her sons Grumpy and George and forces his girlfriend to partake in a twisted picnic before forcing her to walk into a field and shooting her. Jack then decides to stitch a crude smile across Grumpy's face and assembles their bodies into an art piece. Jack meets another woman named Jacqueline of which he considered her "simple." At this point, Jack reveals to have killed over sixty people and murders her after she tried to alert a police officer about the information only to be passed off as intoxicated. Jack slices one of her breasts off and places it on the back of the police officer's car. He also made the remaining breast into a wallet. Jack's killing spree would come to an end when he detains five prisoners and tries to kill them all with one bullet. However, upon seeing that the bullet wasn't a full metal jacket, Jack heads to the store to buy the right brand. His friend S. P. attempts to hold him in gunshot after alerting the police, but Jack tries to appeal to his nature, taking it as the opportunity to kill him when his guard was down. Jack then murders a cop before meeting Verge. He reminds Jack that he never finished his house, leaving Jack to construct a morbid one out of his victims' corpses. Following the Verge through Hell, Jack tries to justify his actions as being for the sake of art only for Verge to deride him of his delusions of grandeur. He shows Jack that his bridge had burned down years ago, thus making it apparent that Jack would be condemned for his crimes. Jack feebly tries to escape his fate by escaping Hell, but he loses his grip on the walls and falls into the eternal pit below. Personality Jack is nothing more than the personification of pure evil, psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, and cruelty. Throughout the film we are continuously shown the atrocities Jack commits for his own pleasure. Jack views murder as art and takes deep sadistic pleasure from killing people, inflicting pain, and horrifying his victims before killing them. Jack has no qualms with, and even enjoys killing children, men, and women. During one of his earlier kills, he mentioned that he had killed 66 people and then went on to torture and murder his "girlfriend", so by the end of the film, which was many years after Jack had killed 67 people, based on how frequently Jack killed people, it is likely he had killed over 100 people, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in history, and even one of the most prolific fictional serial killers. Like any other psychopath, Jack was born without a conscience or the ability to empathize, emotionally connect, or feel remorse. This can be seen when Jack casually mutilates a baby duckling and leaves it to drown when he was a small child. It is presumed that his sadistic and narcissistic traits are also an innate part of his personality as he exhibited violent traits at a young age. Jack has many defining traits, but one of his more notable ones is how devoid of emotion he truly is. Jack seemingly has no understanding or capability of emotions or how people feel them. He practices faces in the mirror to try and mimic them, but when actually in a situation where he should feel them naturally, he has no ability to do so. This can be seen when he casually mocks the mother of the two children he had just brutally killed and proceeded to force her to engage with their corpses. Jack claimed that he viewed his murders as art. He went into detail and demonstrated that the murders he committed were the only things that brought him any real pleasure. Like a true sadistic psychopath, Jack had no qualms torturing, mutilating, or killing in some of the most cruel ways possible for nothing more than his own amusement or pleasure. Unlike most dark protagonists, Jack is one of the only protagonists, or even movie characters in general, to be so clearly devoid of redeemable or human qualities. Jack seems to revel in his status as a serial killer and is fully aware of how horrible his actions are, and yet, this only makes it more pleasurable for him. Jack even goes as far as to call Nazi's idols, and then compares himself to them, calling himself an idol and a unique serial killer. Overall, as the movie continuously reinforces, Jack is pure evil. He is a man who was born without the natural feeling of empathy and this has allowed him to commit some of the most horrific actions imaginable. In the end, Jack felt no remorse for his crimes, and in his final moments on Earth, he built a house out of many of the corpses which he had stored from his murders. When Jack is being escorted through hell by Virgil, Virgil claims that Jack is the most depraved and horrible soul that he has ever encountered, even going as far as to call Jack an Antichrist. Finally, Jack gets what is coming to him when he tries to escape Hell and fails, falling and plummeting into the deepest and darkest depths of Hell. Gallery House-jack-built.jpg The-House-That-Jack-Built-1.jpg The-House-That-Jack-Built-2.jpg Category:Movie Villains Category:Sadists Category:Deceased Category:Male Category:Destroyer of Innocence Category:Serial Killers Category:Homicidal Category:Live Action Villains Category:Horror Villains Category:Enigmatic Category:Egotist Category:Charismatic Category:Faux Affably Evil Category:Titular Category:Pure Evil Category:Protagonists Category:Torturer Category:Misogynists Category:Misanthropes Category:Exploitation Villains Category:Psychopath